Abstract
BackgroundThe adverse effects of advancing maternal age on offspring's health and development are well understood. Much less is known about the impact of paternal age.MethodsWe explored paternal age-offspring cognition associations in 772 participants from the West of Scotland Twenty-07 study. Offspring cognitive ability was assessed using Part 1 of the Alice Heim 4 (AH4) test of General Intelligence and by reaction time (RT).ResultsThere was no evidence of a parental age association with offspring RT. However, we observed an inverse U-shaped association between paternal age and offspring AH4 score with the lowest scores observed for the youngest and oldest fathers. Adjustment for parental education and socioeconomic status somewhat attenuated this association. Adjustment for number of, particularly older, siblings further reduced the scores of children of younger fathers and appeared to account for the lower offspring scores in the oldest paternal age group.ConclusionWe observed a paternal age association with AH4 but not RT, a measure of cognition largely independent of social and educational experiences. Factors such as parental education, socioeconomic status and number of, particularly older, siblings may play an important role in accounting for paternal age-AH4 associations. Future studies should include parental intelligence.
Highlights
Changing trends in education, employment and reproductive technologies have led to a rise in the average age of childbearing in men and women in many industrialised countries since the mid1970s [1,2,3,4,5]
Respondents with data on paternal age had slightly higher Alice Heim 4 (AH4) scores (mean (standard deviation (SD)) AH4 in respondents included vs. excluded from analyses: 39.3 (10.0) vs. 37.7 (10.4)) and lower reaction time (RT) (536.0 (66.3) vs. 545.7 (78.2) milliseconds) than those without; those with cognitive measures were almost identical to those without, in terms of paternal age (29.9 (5.9) vs. 29.6 (6.2) years)
Maternal age clearly increased with increasing paternal age, as would be expected due to assortative mating, mothers tended to be around two years younger than fathers at the time of their child’s birth
Summary
Employment and reproductive technologies have led to a rise in the average age of childbearing in men and women in many industrialised countries since the mid1970s [1,2,3,4,5]. While the adverse effects of advancing maternal age are well understood, [5] considerably less is known about the impact of father’s age on the health and development of their offspring. An emerging literature suggests that paternal age may impact on offspring cognitive abilities [12,13,14,15,16]. These studies have all reported lower IQ scores in children with older fathers and all but one [12,13,14,16] report lower IQ scores in children of younger fathers. Much less is known about the impact of paternal age
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